In a cloud computing era, a data center (DC) network faces many challenges. In a conventional IDC (Internet data center) network, a network and a service are separated. Because of the separation of a network and a service, the conventional IDC network is manually configured by an administrator by using a command line or by a network management system, and is a static network. Therefore, service deployment efficiency is low, and dynamic adjustment cannot be implemented. Moreover, because of the separation of a network and a service, the conventional IDC network is hard to be customized and a long adjustment period, and therefore years of feature and architecture adjustment and introduction of a new device are usually required to satisfy a new service.
It is found through practice that, introduction of an SDN (software-defined networking) technology into the IDC network helps resolve the foregoing problem. SDN is a new-type network architecture, and its design philosophy is to separate a control plane of a network from a data forwarding plane of the network, and implement programmable control. An SDN-based IDC network (SDN IDC network) can improve service deployment efficiency, enhance a customization capability, and shorten an adjustment period.
In the SDN-based IDC network, traffic control is performed by using an SDN controller. However, due to the lack of an effective adjustment method, in an existing network, only blind adjustment without a basis or adjustment according to only experience can be performed. Therefore, precision and real-time performance are poor, and balance adjustment cannot be performed on egress traffic of the IDC network.